The Year of the HTPC

An anonymous reader writes "While home theater PC hardware was once limited to a few specialized companies, those days are long gone and home theater computing is now big business. At this year's CES every hardware company, no matter their size or area of interest, brought a some cool new products too and no one forgot about the burgeoning home theater market. This fervor for home theater PCs was evident all over the show, but it mainly manifested itself in computer cases. This article goes over an extensive list of the products seen there."

Comments

XBMC

[resonance]

Microsoft sure missed the boat on this one - a chipped xbox with Xbox Media Center blows away any HTPC setup I've ever seen. Plays every format, runs happily on your network, simple to use, great interface....

Overhead projector + LCD panel = home theater

[Nick Gisburne]

I don't go for all this integrated malarky. I bought an overhead projector, added an LCD panel with video input, connected up my DVD player, and used a white bed sheet (oh yes) stretched out on a wooden frame (knocked together in minutes). There you go, a 6-foot wide screen, with REAL theater feel. And it only cost me £170 in total ($US 260?). Integrated my arse, I like to have hulking great machines for each and every task! I could hook up a games console but being attacked life-size creatures in shoot-em-ups would probably scare the crap out of me!

Re:What about HDTV ?

[The Salamander]

Myth works great with HD. Two cards that I have used are the air2pc and pcHDTV.

I've had a PVR-500 (dual NTSC) and air2pc (single ATSC) server running for quite a long time now.

I actually found HD (digital) to be much easier to setup than regular analog.

I am going through this

[tacokill]

I just went through this and am still trying to figure this out. I just got an HDTV. See my earlier post, here.

In my previous post, I mentioned that my HTPC was the best looking device attached to my HDTV. I am now amending that to "2nd best" (hard to compete with a 1080i feed of DiscoveryHD).

Nonetheless, I have noticed one major problem that needs to be resolved with HTPC's. The sound card. I've used many many different kinds of sound cards and without exception, ALL of them output stereo ONLY through the SPDIF/Coax. I just bought a Turtle Beach Montego and finally, I have found a card that can produce true 5.1 Dolby Digital on the fly. The rest advertise 5.1 and the like -- but what they mean is 5.1 when you pump the analog signal to their speakers. NOT 5.1 out of the digital-out.

This is not a big deal for DVDs because most soundcards have Dolby digital pass through -- so they pass the 5.1 signal to your A/V receiver and it decodes the signal. However, for MP3's, downloaded movies, or anything else you are play on your HTPC, there is no real 5.1 solution --- unless you go with a Turtle Beach unit (or M-Audio, which I haven't tried). Yes, you can "simulate" but at the core, it's only a stereo feed with most sound cards.

The second thing I have noticed, with respect to HTPC's is this: Why the hell don't the frontend software makers realize that MANY of us store our media (movies, tv, music) on network shares. Why is this a big deal? Because I fire up Windows MCE and I find out that, in order to play a movie from the network, it has to copy the movie to my local library first. You can't just play it over the network. It must first be copied to the local machines. WTF? I see this design a lot and I suspect its because many ppl are trying to run HTPC's over 802.11. Here's some advice: don't. Just suck it up and run the cable. Your life will be much better for it. Trust me. I tried every setup imaginable.

These are just a few annoyances that I've encountered while setting up my HTPC. I don't yet have a capture card/TV card so I haven't gotten to setting up the TV part of this.

The good news is that my setup (finally) works pretty damn well, all things considered. I agree this is the year of the HTPC because I've just been through it.


With my Meedio system, I can do the following:
a) Play XViD, DiVX, SVCD, or any other format directly from a network share
b) Get weather, complete with radar images
c) Play my mp3's -- like a music library w/ jukebox
d) View photos as slideshow over a network share
e) View and play streaming music (Shoutcast)
f) Control the whole system with a remote control -- VERY IMPORTANT!!!